That overwhelming feeling you get...

... when you reorganize your planner setup.

I am currently writing my Bachelor and I have had an immense planner fail the last couple of months. I do not thrive without a schedule where I am accountable for my actions often. My department have the best plan for a thesis course I have ever seen with plenty of deadlines, and we discuss each other's texts in a group (we are about ten people writing for the same supervisor and we studied together last term so we know each other very well) which is great. However, the deadlines are biweekly or less so I lose momentum. I am so overwhelmed, I have a lot on my plate all the time and I feel stressed because I need my planner to work for me and it does not!

My last planner related post was about changing from Dodopad to Filofax week per view. Nope. Did not work. (That sucked. I hate the standard week per view! Hate it!) So, what I have done is that I have gone back to the Dodopad, but I have added some things to get a better overview and to be able to plan my days in detail, because that is what I have needed for a long time. I got inspired by Joshua LaPorte's video on his weekly review process and I have printed a week's worth of Limetreefruits' daily planning pages (as you may know, I am a big fan of her work) for detailed planning and her monthly pages for a better overview. I really, really, really want to buy her 2014 planner pack! Cannot afford it at the moment though, but I am sorta' planning to buy an a5 Filofax original in green around the end of June (for my birthday) so I will hopefully be able to buy it then.

 Well, then. (Ignore the rugged edges of the monthly view, I cut all of them at once with scissors, k?) I decided to keep the Dodopad anyway, because I feel that it is a good weekly view and the set times are in the focus. I have colour coded them according to class throughout and everything else is in black Frixion because my work hours and so on is not necessarily set in stone. The day per page ones are Frixion only, too, because I do not have a lot of colour ink in my printer ;) I do not really need to archive my DPP either, they are just for time management and not much else.

What I stole from Joshua is that he only have a weeks worth or so of day per page, so he is forcing himself, literally, to review them when he puts in new ones - in my setup, these are the day per page ones. When I lack motivation, energy and focus, a super detailed plan is great, no excuses! I have been struggling with my weekly review ever since I realized that it does not do anything else than benefit me. Well, I will see if this works, I think so :)

I am a little excited to see how this desk-product will work in the field, so to speak. The risk is that I will be overwhelmed since there are three (!) different views, but I think I have it covered anyway. The monthly view is for at-a-glance of the important stuff, you can move everything else around. It is supposed to be a notification, sort of "hey, something important happens here, plan around it!". The weekly is the agenda for the classes and tickler for upcoming day planning, and the day per page is where the real time management happens.

Messy? Maybe.. We will see :) What do you think? Any tips and tricks you want to share?

(All of the above is my opinions, I did not receive any compensation for featuring above products)